I feel a bit sorry...

​... for some lovely guests from Portugal/Brazil, who spend three days with us, leaving Sunday morning. They had themselves a taste of some seriously dreich weather as part of their Orkney experience, but I so wish that could have been here yesterday as compensation.

​I took this picture of the waterfront three steps from the Creel an hour or so after they had left on the Pentalina to Gills Bay. The clear weather led William and me to decide on a little Sunday photo outing. And what a day it gave us. Here is a selection of my pics from yesterday, Sunday 20 November.

Looking on on the North Sea from the end of the Ayre of Cara, a beach at the north end of South Ronaldsay.
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We stepped down onto the beach. It was low tide and there was ground frost in the valleys of the seaweed.
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Our next stop was on Burray to shoot this – a view over Scapa Flow's Echnaloch Bay.
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Two views over Scapa from Churchill Barrier No. 2. The mountains of Hoy looked wonderful with their snowcaps.
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Having driven on to Kirkwall, we bought some sandwiches and took them up to the top of of Wideford Hill, where we ate them as we enjoyed this view of the Bay of Kirkwall with the isle of Shapinsay in the distance.
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We got chatting with two nice first-year archeology students from UHI who were also out for a walk (looking for a cairn that refused to be found) and so set off together to look for  and this time successfully find – the Cuween chambered cairn just outside Finstown.

The view from the cairn's hilltop location was splendid. I took photographs of the view while the others explored the cairn's interior.

View down the hill onto two islets  closest is Holm of Griombister, and the outer one is Damsay. It is uninhabited now, but one can just make out the ruins of a Norse hall on its tip. Earl Erlend Haraldsson was  killed there by 2 other earls in 1154.

This is the hall in question, maximum zoom of the telephoto on my little point-and-shoot camera.
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